Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another
video on ForgottenWeapons.com. I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here at the range
today courtesy of the Morphy Auction House because we're gonna do some shooting with
one of the guns that they are selling in their upcoming April of 2019 firearms auction. Now I did a video yesterday about the history
and the mechanics of this gun, how exactly it works. And that's quite an in-depth thing, and I strongly
recommend that you take a look at it if you haven't already. If you have of course, this is an AVS-36. It is the first self-loading rifle adopted by
the Soviet Union as a standard infantry rifle. And only lasted a couple years in their
service, it was replaced by Tokarev rifles. And these are extremely rare in the
United States today. And they're all select-fire. So I'm go ahead and start this thing off on semi-auto.
Let's see how it shoots in semi-auto, compare that to things like the G43, the M1, the SVT,
and then we'll flip the fun switch and see what happens. It does have a 15 round magazine by the way. You can kind of feel that that's a fast cycling action. ... It doesn't kick hard, but it kicks quickly.
It's got a very, very rapid recoil impulse. I don't know if I'm describing that
very well, but it's kind of a jumpy gun. Other than that, shoots great.
It's got a decent trigger in it. You could hear the clangs. That's a
gong not far away, but still not super easy. Alright now, full-auto. Hoo hoo. Wow. Alright, that is basically
like shouldering a jackhammer. What's interesting though is the muzzle brake, the
compensator right here, actually does a pretty good job. It jumps around substantially, well,
you shouldn't say it jumps around, it vibrates on you substantially,
but it doesn't actually climb all that much. That is every bit as impossible to shoot accurately
and with any sense of your surroundings as the M14. This is truly one of those rifles
that has no business being select-fire. Flip that guy to semi-auto,
that's the way to actually use this. You know it's interesting, the Soviets in '36 took
about a year and a half, or maybe two years, to figure out the lesson of the infantry rifle
that the US spent 12 years with with the M14. Which is: it's really more effective
in semi-auto than full-auto. That said, it's pretty darn fun in full-auto.
And here's one other thing, the reason that you're all the way back there is I'm
going to show you just how far this thing flings the brass. It's about 50 feet, so check this out. And there it all comes raining down. You've actually got a discernable delay between when the last
bullet hits the berm, and when the first case comes down out of orbit. The AVS-36 is this very cool, very rare, very first element in the
development lineage of the Soviet self-loading standard service rifles. Here in the US we like to think that we were the first with the
M1 Garand, but this actually basically slightly predates the M1. And it's magazine-fed, and it's select-fire,
and it's a fascinating gun mechanically. And I can certainly understand why
the Soviets replaced it with the SVT. ... It's really cool to get a chance to take a look at one.
This is not the sort of gun you get to see fired very often. So if you're interested in having it, it is
of course coming up for sale at Morphy's. There is a link in the description text
below to ForgottenWeapons.com. From there you can click over to Morphy's catalogue and see all the information you might want to know about it. And I think that'll pretty much wrap up our video.
Except I have 15 rounds left, and what shall I do with them? Fun selector - a hundred percent fun. Here we go. Whoo, thanks for watching.
If you look closely at around 4:25 you can observe Ian's ears flapping from the full auto recoil. :)